Something Short and Sweet

by H. E. Bates

  ‘I feel wonderful,’ Lorn said.

  Lorn put her skirt over her head. It was pink, almost colourless in the tree twilight. Breeze did not speak. She felt nearer to Lorn, at that moment, than she had ever done to anyone in her life. It was an attachment not only of emotion, but of body. She felt drawn to Lorn physically, in a beautiful way, by some idealised force of attraction. It elated her and, for a second or two, stupefied her with its strength and gentleness.

  It was only when Lorn said at last, ‘Come on, Breezy, cover your shame, child, do, and get a stitch or two on,’ that she came back to her normal self. Even then she did not speak. She wanted to speak and she stood trying to speak, to frame some words to express at least a hint of her affection, but nothing came.

  In five minutes she was dressed. The forest was then almost dark, and looking up at the fragments of sky above the heavy mass of trees she felt some kind of balm in them. She felt completely herself, at rest again.

  II

  ‘Lorn,’ Breeze said, ‘you must have been in love, sometime?’

  It was early January, and now they had nothing to do, on the long winter nights, except read and talk and evolve unrealised theories about the future, the farm, the world, themselves and men. They argued hard, quarrelled a little; but the central core of affection between them was never soured or shaken. It was dark south-west weather, wild warm days of rain followed by black nights, when they could do very little outside. They settled down after tea and read books, had supper at eight and generally talked till ten. ‘The less we go out, the less we spend,’ they said.

  ‘Yes,’ Lorn said.

  ‘But when was it? You never told me. You never said anything.’

  ‘I should have told you if I’d ever told anybody.’

  ‘Did it go on long?’

  ‘Two years. If you can call that long.’

  ‘Did you – did it ever come to anything?’

  ‘Yes.’

  Breeze had wanted to know this. She felt some-how that it concerned her, was important. She had felt, sometimes, that it might distress her. Now she felt almost indifferent, only curious. As something in the past, it hardly touched her.

  ‘Only once?’

  ‘No. A lot. Almost every time we saw each other. Almost whenever we could.’

  ‘It must be a long time ago, or you couldn’t talk about it.’

  ‘Three or four years. Four years.’

  ‘Who wanted it most? Did he, or you?’

  ‘Both of us. We both did. We couldn’t go on without it. It wouldn’t have meant anything.’

  Breeze did not speak. She wanted to ask something else. Lorn said:

  ‘Why this sudden discussion of my affairs, young lady?’

  ‘We swore we’d have no secrets.’

  ‘Well, I’ve told you now.’

  ‘Lorn,’ Breeze said, ‘what’s it like? The loving part. The proper loving.’

  ‘Sometimes there’s nothing there.’

  ‘And others?’

  ‘You must know. I can’t explain. It’s something you can’t tell.’

  ‘Like some electric shock?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘What then?’

  ‘Partly electric. But more a fulfilment. You take something from each other, and something in you is fulfilled.’

  ‘That doesn’t make sense.’

  ‘I know. It’s a thing that doesn’t make sense. Why should it?’

  Breeze said earnestly: ‘Does it change you?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How? Physically?’

  ‘Partly. It must do. But I don’t think you’d notice it anyway, whatever it does.’

  ‘Not till afterwards?’

  ‘No.’ Lorn got up. ‘I don’t think you do till afterwards. Till you must do without it.’

  She went into the kitchen, gathered plates and knives and forks from the dresser, and came back to lay supper. Breeze looked at her with an absent smile, and said:

  ‘Why is it all over?’

  Lorn flacked the cloth, smoothed it, her eyes looking down flat on its dead whiteness.

  ‘I never said it was all over.’

  Breeze could not speak. She felt it instantly, for some reason, to be something between them. She felt the minute beginnings of a queer jealousy. It was not active; it moved in her consciousness like a remote pain, pricking her.

  When it faded, in a moment, and she was able to speak, she said: ‘I don’t see what you mean. How do you mean, it’s not all over?’

  ‘Oh! Just that. We had a pact and parted, but very shortly he’ll be home again, and then—’

  ‘Home?’

  ‘He’s in India.’

  ‘India? A soldier?’

  ‘An army doctor.’

  ‘Let me make the cocoa,’ Breeze said.

  She bent down before the fire, pushed the kettle against the logs. The kettle sang a little. She straightened up, mixed cocoa and milk in the two cups, on the table, while Lorn cut bread. Breeze felt strangely anxious, as though Lorn had told her she was ill or was going away. Remote, not fully conscious, her anxiety pricked her, as the jealousy had done, like a small pain. The kettle boiled and she made cocoa, half looking at Lorn. How very strong Lorn was: big wind-cut arms, solid neck, such friendly strength, so warm. She stood absently fascinated, the small pain dying away.

  ‘It was a question of finishing his period of service,’ Lorn said. ‘He wanted to go back.’

  ‘He wanted to go back more than he wanted you.’

  ‘No. He wanted to go back. I understood that all right. I wanted him to go back. I was only twenty-three, just out of college.’

  ‘What difference did that make? If it was all you say it was?’

  ‘That was just it. We wanted to see if it made a difference. If it made a difference, well, there it was. If it didn’t, then he could come back, and we’d get married.’

  They sat by the fire, with cocoa and bread and cheese, Lorn with her skirts up, warming her knees.

  ‘I think that’s awful,’ Breeze said. ‘For all it mattered, you were married. Nothing could alter that.’

  ‘I don’t see it. We’d made love. But that was something we couldn’t help. We could help marriage, if we ever got to it. Hence the arrangement.’

  ‘It was like making a business of it,’ Breeze said. She was upset, trembling. ‘It’s a hateful thing. It was like making a business of it, it was like making a business of it! It was awful!’

  ‘Breeze, Breeze.’

  ‘You don’t deny it, do you?’

  ‘Breeze.’

  ‘Who proposed it, he or you?’

  ‘He did. He was older.’

  ‘Then he wasn’t worthy of you! How could he be? Proposing that. Proposing an awful thing like that. He wasn’t worthy of you!’

  ‘Breeze. I can’t bear to hear it.’

  The words were too much for the girl. She began to cry, deeply, with shame and some unhappiness she could not define. She set her cocoa on the hearth, could not see for tears, and spilt it. Lorn put her cup down beside it and put her arms round Breeze’s neck. ‘You’re not to cry. Why are you crying? Breeze. It’s silly to cry.’ She held her, strongly, against the warm resilient bulk of her large body. They sat like mother and child, bound by grief and comfort. ‘You hear me? You’re not to cry.’

  ‘It does me good,’ Breeze said. ‘I shall feel better Hold me. I shall feel better.’

  ‘I’m holding you,’ Lorn said. ‘I’ve got you.’

  ‘Hold me tighter.’

  III

  By April things had begun to move. The rows of herbs began to look vigorous and full of promise. Turned over and hoed, the earth was sweet and black. The two girls planted fresh supplies of plants, new varieties, and sowed seeds. They got up early and worked on into the bright spring evenings, and in the evenings, after a warm day, they could smell the forest, the strong, vigorous and yet almost drowsy odour of a great mass of trees breaking into leaf. They were enchanted
by the new life, by an existence in which, as never before, they felt they had a purpose. They lived physically. Tired out, earth-stained, they came indoors as darkness came on and sat down in the little kitchen-sitting-room in the cottage and sat on without speaking and watched the fading out of the primrosy twilights, their minds dumbly content. Too tired to talk, they ate supper, went to bed early and were up again at six.

  They spent energy needlessly. Lorn did the digging: she had a large four-pronged fork and used it bravely, like a weapon, knocking the soil about, throwing out every stone. She had some strenuous ambition to see the land as smooth as sand, without stones, immaculate. She did a man’s work, and her body got to have some kind of male awkwardness about it: a longer stride, cruder grasp, a way of straddling as she stood. Close to her every day, Breeze did not notice it. She did the hoeing, generally, and the labelling and sowing, and the little artistic things: she would have a little rockgarden by the back door, on the south side, with patches of purple horned viola and winey primulas and rock rose, and then lavender hedges down the paths, giving vistas. ‘You and your vistas,’ Lorn said. But vistas were important; they had the effect of making things seem, to Breeze, not quite as they were, and the illusion was precious. She felt the beauty of things keenly; she could not bear ugliness, and spring drove her into small inexpressible ecstasies. Beauty was everything. It impinged upon her sharply, with pain, so that she felt something immensely precious and personal about the spring. It was for her and she could not share it. Unlike Lorn, she worked in a kind of semi-consciousness, not bravely, but with a kind of absent persistence. She spent greater energy of spirit, dreaming as she worked, and it seemed as if the spring days sucked her up, body and spirit and all, leaving her at times almost crying with weariness. She did not understand this supreme tiredness at all. She worked harder to overcome it, splashing her hoe crudely with clenched hands, forcing herself into the full consciousness of the act, breaking down her dreamy passivity. All the time, and all through spring and summer, it seemed to get worse. The great massed ring of forest seemed to shut out life sometimes, so that she felt imprisoned by a wall of wood and leaf, sucked by a beauty that was almost parasitic into an awful listlessness of spirit that she could not understand. All the time, in contrast to Lorn, she seemed to get more and not less feminine: much slighter, very brown and delicate, with a light detached beauty and an almost irritating remoteness of spirit. It was as though she needed waking up; as though the best of her were not alive.

  Then Lorn noticed it. By the end of May the oaks were in full flower and the forest stood like an olive cloud. The great polished bushes of rhododendron split pinkly into blossom, and the rare sweet-scented wild azaleas, pale yellow. The forest breathed out its enormous but not quite tangible sweetness and sucked back, in turn, the still more enormous breath of the life about it. There were days when, under the shelter of the too-close trees, life was utterly stupefied.

  ‘I get so tired,’ Lorn said. ‘How is it? Do you get tired?’

  ‘Yes. I didn’t want to say anything about it. I thought it was just myself.’

  ‘But how is it? What’s the reason for it?’

  ‘I feel there’s no air.’

  ‘Possibly we need a change,’ Lorn said. ‘We might have been working too hard.’

  ‘But it’s not the work. I’m tired if I sit still.’

  ‘Even so, a change would do us no harm.’

  So they went, for three days, to London. For economy they stayed at a little scrubby hotel off Guildford Street. They ate cheaply; saw films cheaply. London tired them, but in a new way; it stripped off the old lassitude like a heavy skin. They had a double room with one bed, and they stayed in bed, every morning, as late as they dare. And at night, when Lorn took the younger girl in her arms and mothered her down to sleep, Breeze felt a tender and inexplicable restful transfusion of strength take place. She lay close to Lorn and felt again, still not with full consciousness, that queer stirring of remote affection that was like a small pain. It was beautiful, but it was also reassuring, a very wonderful comfort, a strength against trouble. One night Breeze woke up with a start, frightened, not knowing where she was, feeling alone in a strange place. She started wildly up in bed, and said: ‘What is it? I don’t want it! I don’t want it to come, please! I don’t want it,’ but in a moment Lorn stretched out her arms and took her back, saying, ‘Silly kid, silly kid,’ in a voice of strong but amused tenderness.

  ‘What made you wake up in the night?’ she said next moring.

  ‘I was in trouble,’ Breeze said. ‘It was you I wanted. I was all right when I’d got you.’

  That afternoon they went to see a woman, the secretary of an organization specializing in the distribution of rural products. Lorn had heard of her and had written, asking for an interview. This woman made them see various new aspects of things. She raised hopes. Where they had seen, vaguely, that some day they must organise distribution in order to keep going, they now began to see, rationally, how such organization must be planned, how far ahead it must be planned, how little they had done. They would need, in time, packers, a mail-order system, expert knowledge on this, that and the other. Miss Wills, the secretary, wore light amber rimmed spectacles and spoke in a voice of vinegar and treacle which both Breeze and Lorn disliked. But they felt, beyond the voice and the spectacles, a shrewd, clever, no-nonsense personality. ‘You’re on a good thing, you girls, if you’ll work hard, and come to me whenever you’re stuck. But don’t try to be elegant. You’re amateurs and you can’t afford to be amateurs. We’re in touch with all kinds of markets here and we can take all your stuff, if it’s good, on a commission basis. You’ve got to look at things rationally, Miss Harvey, without a lot of sticky romance. When shall you be ready for production?’

  Lorn told her. ‘We hope to be in a position to do something next year. That’s what we thought.’

  ‘All right. Up to date, what have you done? I mean regarding organization?’

  ‘Not much.’

  ‘Then you must start. I think it might be as well if I came down to see you. Discuss things. I could come’ – she looked up a diary, marked it off in blue pencil – ‘in a fortnight. That is, after Whitsun. I’ll say the week-end of June 5. Let me know if that suits you. Drop me a card: yes or no. That’ll be enough.’

  They went away full of hope, excited. They saw the thing in rational outline at last, no longer some cloudy embryo of romance. They saw that they must work hard, plan, think, that it was not enough to waste an energy of body and spirit. They saw that by working in the dark, they had worked for nothing; they had given themselves up, wholeheartedly, to emptiness.

  ‘I think that’s what made us so tired,’ Lorn said. ‘Working and working and not knowing quite where we were going.’

  ‘Oh! let’s get home, Lorn. I want to be back, doing something. I don’t want to be away any longer.’

  They went back on the following day, excitement still strong, their whole hopes concentrated on the pole of the ideal pointed out by the secretary. ‘I didn’t like her,’ Breeze said. ‘She was too sweet and too sure, but she knew what was what. Oh! Lorn, I’m glad we went. We’ve got something now. We can look forward to something.’

  When they arrived back at the cottage, in the late afternoon, they found a slip on the front door-mat: a cable awaited Lorn at the post office. She at once got on her bicycle and rode with excitement into Lyndhurst. She was back in half an hour. By that time Breeze had tea laid. Lorn laid the cable on the table, for Breeze to read. The cable had been handed in at Port Said, two days previously, and it said:

  Expect arrive London Friday telegraph me Grosvenor Hotel when and where possible meet you have plans for future: Vernon.

  ‘He’s coming home,’ Lorn said. She stood in silence for a moment, and then began to cry. Her strength seemed to vanish at once, she stood weak and in some way foolish, womanish, miserable with joy. All the time Breeze stood apart from her, repelled by some unaccountable
feeling of dislike, not knowing what to do.

  IV

  She was caught up, from that moment, by the force of a peculiar jealousy. She got fixed in her mind, as though by some fierce and abrupt photographic flash, a fully realised picture of the man who was coming. He was about thirty, an easy sociable being, with large, cold medical hands, a man of assurance, with the blond aloof sobriety of the English middle class. She saw also, for some reason, his mother in the background. Why, she did not know, but she saw the mother as some skinny and also aloof halo behind the man. She was holding a cablegram too, and smiling, with indulgent proud stretched lips, like some absurd filmic emblem of maternity and sacrifice: the brave waiting for the brave. She felt that she hated her too.

  She saw the change in Lorn with identical clarity. Emotion sharpened her before she knew it. With quiet derision she saw Lorn get on her bicycle, the next morning, to bike off to send her wire. She was not prepared for the sudden switch over from adoration to contempt. She had not time to consider it or defend herself from it when it came. It hit her, striking from within, before she had time to think. ‘Lorn looks so silly, rushing off. Rushing off like a school-kid.’ Lorn, getting on her bicycle in a hurry, had got her skirt bundled beneath her, showing the laddered and worn tops of her working stockings. She looked, for a second, ungainly, heavily ridiculous. The darned stockings and the gap of bare red flesh above them looked ugly. ‘Her legs are ugly. Why doesn’t she pull her skirts down?’ She rode off with excited haste, her thick legs pounding on the bicycle pedals. ‘She’s got the saddle too low. She hasn’t raised it since I used it. Her knees stick out.’ The impressions were instinctive, having no incentive from the conscious self. She could not control them.

  Lorn was gone an hour. Breeze worked, meanwhile, on the plot, hoeing among rows of thyme and parsley. It was warm, heavy weather; weeds were coming fast. Breeze kept looking towards the house. She heard at last Lorn’s bicycle bell and, looking up, saw Lorn herself pushing the bicycle up the path: pushing heavily, panting, excited, thick legs lumping down on the path, head forward, mouth open. Instinctively the impression leapt to mind: ‘She thumps her feet down like a horse. Why doesn’t she hold herself straight?’ Lorn was untidy, hot from the ride. ‘Her face looks awful. Like raw meat. Has she been to Lyndhurst and back like that?’ Lorn almost flung the bicycle against the water-butt at the house corner and thumped into the house, catching her foot against the step, stumbling. ‘She looks as though she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She looks stupid. Only half there.’